Nathan Weinstock's 1969 book
Le Sionisme contre Israël (the title was incorrectly translated Zionism: False
Messiah for the 1979 English edition), was for years cited as
scholarly justification for attacks on Israel. Now Weinstock has rejected the idea that Arab
hostility to Israel is rooted in a desire for
National Liberation.

III. Letter to the
Metula News Agency
Weinstock explains that he rejects the antisemitism of the Left and has
forbidden republication of "Zionism False Messiah"
Translated by Colin Meade

IV. Two excerpts from
Weinstock's 2004 book, Story of Dogs. Dhimmitude in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
dealing with the Palestinian Arab political
culture of death and Weinstock's current view of Zionism False
Messiah.
Translated by Jared Israel

"[...] I feel I have to make it
clear that I formally and explicitly disassociate myself from all
these pseudo-analyses tending, directly or indirectly, to justify
(to call things by their real names), the liquidation of Israel,
while implicitly accepting 'incidentally' that of the Israelis
themselves."
-- Nathan Weinstock in letter, posted below

Nathan
Weinstock's book,
Le Sionisme contre Israël
[Zionism Against Israel], or, as the title was
mistranslated for the English edition, Zionism False Messiah, has
for years been cited as scholarly justification for opposing Israel.

In 2003 we received an
email from a M. Grunchard in Belgium, explaining that Nathan Weinstock
has "totally changed his position." M. Grunchard was kind enough to
include the link to an article where Nathan Weinstock discusses his new
opinions, and a letter where he reports that he has instructed his
publisher not to republish
Le Sionisme contre Israël,
which appeared in 1969 and remains one of the sourcebooks of the
anti-Israel movement.

Weinstock's "Stories of Dogs" and the
letter to his publisher have been translated from the original French by
Colin Meadein the UK. So, through international
cooperation, we can present these texts in English for your information.

Nathan Weinstock has
written a book on the same subject, "Histoire de chiens. La dhimmitude
dans le conflict israélo-palestinien" (Mille et Une Nuits, Paris 2004).
It may be purchased at
http://tinyurl.com/cyzpw

There was a time when every article or speech had to be
peppered with quotations from Marx. That's gone out of fashion - which
is a good thing, since it did no real honour to Marx's memory to force
everything into his mould. Even so, you do not have to be a Marx
worshipper to recognise that he was a penetrating thinker and a subtle
analyst of social and political conflicts. So, why not approach the
Israeli-Arab conflict through a Marxist observation?

As we know, Karl Marx displayed no love for his
community of origin. His 1843 "Jewish question" is so aggressively
anti-Jewish that 19th
century Austrian anti-Semites gleefully
republished it to confound his disciples. And in his letters to Engels,
he described opponents with Jewish ancestry in terms that would nowadays
have him in court. However, in an article written in 1854 [1]
Marx turned his attention to the fate of the Jews of the Holy Land.
Curiously enough, this piece turns out to be more or less the only thing
he ever wrote in which he displays some sympathy for his own people.

So, this is what he says about the Jews of Jerusalem:

[Quote from Marx starts here]

"The Mussulmans, forming about a fourth part of the
whole, and consisting of Turks, Arabs and Moors, are, of course, the
masters in every respect, as they are in no way affected with the
weakness of their Government at Constantinople. Nothing equals the
misery and suffering of the Jews at Jerusalem, inhabiting the most
filthy quarter of the town, called hareth-el-yahoud, this
quarter of dirt
between Mount
Zion and Mount
Moriah, where their synagogues are
situated - the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and
intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins and
living only upon the scanty alms transmitted by their European
brethren. The Jews, however, are not natives, but from distant and
different countries, and are only attracted to Jerusalem by the desire
of inhabiting the Valley of Jehosophat and to die in the very places
where their Redemptor is to be expected.

'Attending their death,' says a French author,
'they suffer and pray. Their regards turned to that mountain of Moriah,
where once rose the temple of Solomon, and which they dare not
approach, they shed tears on the misfortunes of Zion, and their
dispersion over the world.'"[2]

[Quote from Marx ends here]

In passing, Marx informs us that Jerusalem had 15,500
inhabitants, including 8,000 Jews and 4,000 Moslems (Arabs, Turks and
Moors).

His remarks are confirmed by all contemporary observers.
We will leave out the surveys of the Alliance Israelite Universelle,
whose objectivity might be questioned by suspicious readers, and rely
instead on the accounts of Catholic writers of travel guides for
pilgrims to the Holy Land. These edifying tours invariably culminated in
the contemplation of the spectacle - both instructive and heartrending -
of the downtrodden Jews, living in the most extreme poverty. Frozen in
prayer before the Wailing Wall, they formed a living illustration of the
degeneration of the "killers of God."
And in order to heighten the
impact of this grand finale, a point would be made, before undertaking
this final step, including a visit to the Jewish quarter in the
programme.

"This is by far the darkest and most unhealthy part
of the whole city. (…) The wretched appearance of the inhabitants and
the disgusting state of this district mean that nobody passing through
it can forget God's curse which weighs so visibly on the Jewish
people."[3]

Let's return to the picture Marx painted of the Jews of
Jerusalem.

What does he show us?

* That the Jews inhabit "the most filthy quarter of the
town","the
quarter of dirt."

* That they were "the constant objects of Mussulman
oppression and intolerance,"
without this sparing them the insults of
the Greeks and persecution of the Latins.

* That in this period the Jews of Jerusalem were not
indigenous (in fact, the Jewish population of
the city and the larger area had
been growing constantly since the end of the 18thcentury
through the addition of newcomers from the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere)
and that they awaited death while praying for redemption.

[Comment by EC editor Jared Israel starts here]

The above paragraph is confused or
else there is a typographical error in the original. (The translation is
accurate.)

Weinstock states, apparently based on a part of Marx's text which he
does not quote, that as of 1853 the Jewish population of Jerusalem had
been growing constantly since the end of the 18th century, that is, for
five or more decades. That would mean there was an established
indigenous Jewish population in Jerusalem at least before 1800, a century before the first Zionist convention in 1897.

Weinstock states that Jewish newcomers came from within the Ottoman
Empire and elsewhere. Those who came from within the Empire were
migrating within the borders of a state. Obviously Muslims were
also migrating within this state. None of these migrants, Jews or
Muslims, were colonists or even immigrants, but it is only about the
Jews that people say, "They were not 'indigenous.'" Nathan Weinstock
makes a similar point below.

Notice that in 1853, 44 years before the first Zionist convention in
Basel, Marx wrote that there were twice
as many Jews as Moslems in Jerusalem.

According to Marx, the Jews were there because their passion
for Jerusalem was so great it overcame their horror at how they
were treated: "...the constant
objects of Mussulman oppression and
intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins..."

[Comment by EC editor Jared Israel ends here]

Nathan Weinstock's text resumes:

What Marx has described here - and all contemporary
observers agreed with him - is quite simply that the Jews of Jerusalem
(like other Jews in what is commonly called the Holy Land and as was the
rule in the whole Moslem world) were reduced to a status of structural
and intrinsically discriminatory degradation, that of being "dhimmis."

The condition of being a "protected" subject - or
dhimmi - at the mercy of the Moslem authorities, is the humiliating
status laid down by the Sharia (Islamic religious law) for the
minorities of the Book. It therefore also applied to the Christians of
the Moslem world, which did not stop them from displaying a virulent
anti-Semitism. They seemed to have derived,
from the anti-Jewish traditions of the Christian
churches, psychological compensation
for their daily humiliation by turning on pariahs on an even lower rung of the
scale of social respect than theirs. Thus, in 1847, inspired in all
likelihood by the Damascus affair,[4]Jerusalem's Orthodox Christians accused their Jewish fellow citizens of
"ritual crime."[5]

Nothing shows the degraded situation of the dhimmi more
clearly than the case of Yemen. In this area, every man carried a
curved dagger in his belt. Jews, however, were forbidden to carry a
dagger, symbolising the Moslems'
view of the Jews as sub-human. The degraded status laid down for dhimmis
was expressed in discriminatory rules of dress, a ban on riding noble
beasts (horses and camels) and the requirement to give way to any
Moslem, over whom Jews could obviously not exert any kind of authority,
and to pay special taxes (kharaj and jizya) and other additional
levies, without this guaranteeing them any protection against repeated
attacks by the populace.

Indeed, the "protection" offered to the dhimmis did
not safeguard them from persecution. In the Middle East alone (and
similar events occurred in North Africa and the whole Arabo-Moslem
world), confessional riots and massacres of non-Moslems took place in
1850, 1856 and 1860 in Aleppo, Nablus and Damascus successively. The
Jews of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias and Safed were subjected to raids,
pillage and extortion throughout the first half of the 19th
century.[6]
The situation of the dhimmis improved after 1838-40 with the
establishment of European consulates in Jerusalem; diplomats demanded
that they benefit from the firman of the Sultan of 18 February 1856
granting legal equality to minorities. However, these external
interventions produced a backlash, sparking off bloody outbreaks of
inter-confessional hatred against the Christians of Lebanon in 1853-60.

When one gives a bit of serious thought to the nature of
this structural humiliation inflicted on the dhimmis, the category which
springs to mind to cover their condition is that of colonialism. Indeed,
the dehumanisation imposed on Jews and Christians as a whole, in
contrast to all Moslems, meant that each member of the latter community,
irrespective of their social rank, enjoyed a privileged position in
relation to the minorities. This corresponds strictly to the condition
of the colonised as described by Albert Memmi[7]Thus, historically, the much decried colonialism, whose misdeeds in the
Middle East people like to denounce, is perhaps not always to be found
where you might expect it. Viewed phenomenologically, the fact is that
in the Arabo-Moslem world the subhuman, the "dog," is first and foremost
the Jew.

I am aware that my use of these terms will arouse
incomprehension and even indignation in many Moslems whose sincerity I
don't question. They will be keen to remind me that the Jew was a
familiar figure in the North African or Levantine [8]
scene, that a multitude of ties linked the Jews and their neighbours and
that there was a certain mutual dependence between the respective
cultures. These are not false observations, but they are hopelessly
vitiated by an error of perspective. To use a stark analogy, in the
final analysis this proximity of Jews and Moslems was similar to the one
between the rider and his horse - with the Jews underneath. The
blindness afflicting the Moslem observer in this respect corresponds
precisely to that of the colonialist who remembers with great feeling
the years of hard work performed at his side by his "boy," without
grasping that their relationship was based on submission. It's the
perception of a [slave owning] southerner.

The point of recalling this situation is that it
played a role in the birth of and attitudes towards the clash between the
Zionist newcomers and the Palestinian peasantry in the "Holy Land."Away
from superficial explanations and fashionable off-the-peg
simplifications,[9]a critical look at the origins of the friction between the Arab population [10]
and the Yishuv [11] reveals that the first significant conflict between the two communities
had nothing to do with agricultural settlements, the purchase of land or
the Zionist project as such. The clash broke out following the decision
by the pioneer Jews of Sejera in 1908 to dismiss their Circassian guards
and replace them with Jews, with the establishment of the Hachomer
(Watchmen) organisation modelled on the self-defence units set up in
Eastern Europe to combat pogroms. The reason was the same too - to be
able to defend their security and organise their own defence without
relying on anyone else. It should be emphasised here that the defence in
question was directed against pillaging Bedouin and cattle rustlers who
preyed on all the villagers, and not against dispossessed farmers. It
was precisely the dismissal of the (non-Arab) Circassian guards which
brought resentment against the Zionist settlers to a head. Why? Why did
the neighbouring rural Arabs feel affected by this change? The
explanation is of stark simplicity: dhimmis are destined to live under
Moslem protection. So what right could they, who were less than dogs,
have to bear arms and ensure their own defence? In so doing they were
disregarding their allotted status of submission.

The origin of the confessional brawling between Arabs
and Jews which broke out in Jaffa in March 1908 is obscure. On the other
hand, the underlying reason for the agitation against the Jews of Hebron
(who were not newcomers, but people of the old Yishuv, who were,
incidentally, opposed to Zionism) in December 1908-January 1909 - is
clear, as Henry Laurens has shown from a study of French diplomatic
archives. "The Moslem population was called on to boycott Jewish
businesses to put the Jews back in their place."[12]
The conservative inhabitants of the town did not at all appreciate the
Young Turk revolution and its promises of Ottoman citizenship. The Jews
should not get it into their heads that they were equal to others. This
Jewish "insolence" required a ruthless reminder of the rules of the
confessional hierarchy; the colonised had to be put back in their place.
On top of this, minds were being poisoned by the (basically
interchangeable) myths of the Jewish conspiracy and the Masonic plot
brought in by European anti-Semitism, which were gradually spreading in
the Middle East. The nationalist leader Rashid Rida, for example,
considered the Young Turk "Union and Progress" Committee as nothing more
than an expression of Jewish and Masonic power. These fantasies continue
to flourish to this day thanks to constant reading of the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion and other anti-Jewish ravings of Western origin.

However the most striking fact, judging by the
slogans raised, is that the anti-Jewish riots - and it is significant
that the attacks were aimed not only at recent immigrants but also (and
sometimes mainly) at the old Yishuv which had existed long before the
Zionist enterprise, as at Hebron, and even on occasion at the
Samaritans, who were not even Jewish - were not driven by opposition to
Zionism (property purchase, settlement on land, policy of exclusive
employment of Jewish labour). Indeed, anti-colonialist rhetoric was
strangely absent from the crowds' chants. They did not express the
aspiration of the masses for independence or a protest against the
expulsion of peasants from their land. No. The bloody riots of 1 May
1921 in Jaffa took place to shouts of "Moslems defend yourselves, the
Jews are killing your women!",[13]
i.e. by an appeal to a classical archetype of the racist or Southern
slave-owner imagination, the exact Middle Eastern equivalent of the
obsessive dread encapsulated in the phrase "don't touch a white woman."

And on 2 November 1921, anniversary of the Balfour
Declaration, what were the slogans yelled out in Jerusalem,[14]
by demonstrators armed with clubs and knives in yet another bloody
attack on the Jewish population? You might expect slogans expressing the
desire of the masses for self-determination or independence. Not at all.
Their rallying cry was: "Palestine is ours, and the Jews are our dogs,[15]
the law of Mohammed is the sword and the government is but vanity."[16]
Rather than showing a new anti-imperialist awareness, the demonstrators
were asserting every Moslem's inviolable right ("the government is but
vanity") to impose, by the sword, "the law of Mohammed" according to
which "the Jews are their dogs."

This is what people don't want to hear about.

To complete my demonstration, it should be noted that the
explosions of hatred which would bring bloodshed to the Jewish community
in the 1920s were mainly directed not against the rural settlements or
urban districts created by Zionist immigrants, but the Jews of the old
Yishuv, a partly Arabic speaking community which had been present in the
area
for decades and tended to be against Zionism for reasons of
religious conservatism. Nonetheless, in 1929 in Hebron and Safed, the
Arab population poured into the Jewish quarters to slit throats,
mutilate, castrate and rape their inhabitants in an outpouring of
atrocious barbarity. Unlike the Zionist newcomers, these religious Jews
had never thought to take any measure of self-defence in case of attack,
so they formed an ideal prey for the killers. But what we should note is
that this bloodthirsty fury targeted peaceful neighbours, who had
nothing to do with conflicts over the Zionist settlement policy and
whose only crime was to be Jews.

So, please, spare us the catch-all explanations proffered
by lazy minds claiming that everything can be explained by the injustice
suffered by the Palestinian people. What we have here is quite simply
the results of the dehumanisation of the dhimmis and the dreadful
punishment reserved for those wanting to escape their status. At the
start of the twentieth century, the members of the old Yishuv became the
companions in misfortune of other non-Moslem minorities such as the
Assyrians and Armenians, also suspected of seeking to throw off the yoke
of dhimmitude.

Finally, the key role played by dhimmitude in the
Palestinian conflict is nicely illustrated in the development of the
concept of the "Palestinian people."
Henry Laurens has studied the
emergence of the term "Palestinian" in about 1908-09. What is striking
is that, while the concept of "Palestinian" embraces all the successive
waves of Moslem immigration into the Holy Land in the 19th
century, whether Arab or not (Houranis from Syria, North Africans,
Circassians, Bosniacs, etc.), on the other hand the Jewish elements of
that same forming population are excluded. This is the case for the old
Yishuv and of Jews from the Arab-Moslem world (from North Africa,
Bokhara and Yemen), even when Arabic speaking. Any Moslem can by right
join the Palestinian community, any Jew is a priori excluded - thrown to
the dogs.

I don't wish to be misunderstood. It would be absurd
to reduce the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which is of unusual
complexity, to a single factor, that of dhimmitude. But it would be just
as vain to seek to grasp its deep roots without taking into account a
structural factor which coloured the Arab perception of the Jew, Israeli
or not, from the outset, and continues to do so today. The "Arab
rejection" of the Israeli reality and the very legitimacy of a Jewish
state in Palestine runs like a red thread through the history of the
conflict. This visceral hatred of Israel, the unbearable sense of
humiliation which this state arouses cannot, as if often claimed, be
explained by the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees. It goes further
back: on 15 May 1948, at the very moment when the regular armies of the
Arab states crossed the Jordan - and before there was a single
Palestinian refugee - the Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam
Pasha, declared, "This will be a war of
extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the
Mongolian massacre and the Crusades."[17]
And nor does it stem from the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza
after 1967, since the entire Arab world had boycotted and refused to
recognise the Jewish state, which it demonised and swore to destroy,
since its proclamation in 1948.

Irrespective of the political conditions shaping a
lasting solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict, it first of all requires
a revolution in attitudes. The hour of real peace will strike when
Israelis are, quite simply, accepted as cross-border neighbours, even
though their governments' policies may arouse disagreement. How one
would like to see all those who interminably proclaim their sympathy for
the Palestinian cause contribute to this essential change!

[1] Karl Marx, Declaration of war - on the history of the Eastern
Question, published in the New York Daily Tribune on 15 April
1854. See Marx/Engels, Collected Works, Volume 13 (1980), pp.
100-108. The quoted passage appears on pages 107-108.

[4] [Translator's note - According to David Vital: "The Damascus
Affair (…) arose out of the disappearance in February 1840 of a
father Thomas, superior of the Capuchin house in Damascus, and
reports of his death at the hands of local Jews," who were accused
of wanting his blood for ritual purposes. Confessions were extracted
from Jews by torture, "several unfortunates dying in the process."The case became the object of a major defence campaign in Western
Europe. See: A people apart; a political history of the Jews of
Europe
1789-1939, OUP (Oxford 2001), pp. 232-24]

[8]
[Translator's note - the somewhat archaic term Levant refers
to the region of the Eastern Mediterranean now covered by Syria,
Lebanon and Israel]

[9] This comment includes a large dose of self-criticism. Failing to
evade the trap, I myself made the mistake in a number of writings of
disseminating these simplistic ideas.

[10] In fact the term 'Arab' is misleading. Not all non-Jewish
inhabitants of Palestine are Arabs (for example, Circassians and
Bosniacs), while the Jewish population includes many Arabic-speaking
Jews originating from North Africa and Yemen.

[11] 'Yishuv' is the word used to describe the Jewish communities present
in Eretz-Israel (Holy Land).

[12]
Henry Laurens, op.cit., p. 231.

[13] Ibid., p. 565.

[14]
It should be borne in mind that the from the middle of the 19th
century, well before the first wave of Zionist immigration, the
majority of the population of Jerusalem was Jewish.

[15]
In Arabic "Yahoud kalabna."

[16] Henry Laurens, op.cit., p. 589.

[17] Al-Ahram and New York Times, 16 March 1948 (quoted by Rony E. Gabbay,
A Political History of the Arab-Jewish Conflict (Geneva, 1959), p.
88.

A friend has passed on to me the
above-mentioned article which you published on 28 August [2002].

If you quote D. Bensaid and M.
Warshawsky accurately - and there is, regrettably, no reason to doubt
it - then this only confirms the fact that, in pursuing its
"anti-imperialist" course, the far left has abandoned not only Marxism,
but also any form of rational approach.

Since you quote me in passing, I feel
I have to make it clear that I formally and explicitly disassociate
myself from all these pseudo-analyses tending, directly or indirectly,
to justify (to call things by their real names), the liquidation of
Israel, while implicitly accepting "incidentally" that of the Israelis
themselves.

This is why I have prohibited my
publisher from reissuing Zionism - False Messiah. Let me add
that, while I naively believed - an error of youth - that this book
could fuel a constructive discussion leading to Israeli-Palestinian
coexistence, I came to realise that this had been unforgivable naivety
on my part: the book served only to salve the conscience of avowed and
unconscious anti-Semites.

Finally, time did not stop in 1969 and
I have not remained motionless like a pillar of salt. Since then I have
in fact published a number of things of a different kind of interest. I
will take the liberty of mentioning only one here: the translation of
the Warsaw ghetto diaries of Hillel Seidman, archivist of the kehilla (Du
fond de l'abîme, published by Plon, "Terre humaine").

“[…] Must the Palestinians really confirm one more time the word of
diplomat Abba Eban who regretted that they ‘have never missed the
opportunity to miss an opportunity’?

“That necessitates an effort at rectification. It is time for the
Palestinians to tear themselves away from the morbid self indulgence
which they maintain with respect to their condition as victims. To
break with their erotically charged worship of death. To turn to the
future. To move away from policies which offer as their horizon only
the prospect of making new massacres. They have amply proved that they
can die for their cause. It is a different challenge which they are
called upon to face up to at present: that of living for their country.
And that which says life, says compromise, accommodations, concessions,
realism. Because, just like policy, life is the art of the possible.”

Excerpt 2, p.189 -
On "Zionism False Messiah"

“[Subhead] A Slow Process of Clarification [literally ‘a slow decantation,’ as with the decantation of wine - ji]

“This study will probably disconcert some people who will remember
that I have published thirty five years ago a hefty tome which has been
serving as a reserve of ammunition to the anti-Zionist Left1. [1. Le
Sionisme contre Israël , Paris, François Maspero, 1969] It was the day
after May 68 [i.e., the big French student rebellion -ji] At the time I
was subjugated by Trotskyism and applied myself consequently, as the
perfect dogmatist, not to analyze facts, but to mentally channel them
according to my preconceived and reductive schemas. Sectarianism which
has driven me to simplistic and abusive conclusions and [p.190] even to
some propositions which I cannot reread without shame. Worse than these
genuflections before Leftist schematism was my total unawareness of the
misuse of this simplistic work by the antisemitic upsurge that has
arisen within the sphere of the extreme Left . Artificially disguised
behind the screen of anti-Zionism (and similar in this to its [the
Troskyist Left’s - ji] Stalinist opponents during the time of the
Prague trial and of the “conspiracy of the white jackets” [Soviet trial
of Jewish doctors in ’53 - ji), it [the extreme left] used me as a
“useful idiot” whose Judaism washed it in advance of every suspicion.

My current vision is the result of a slow process of clarification
[decantation]. It owes a lot to dialogues and exchanges born within the
framework of my family; with my wife Micheline, who has helped me
understand the universe of the Sephardic Jews who have been subject to
dhimmitude in the flesh; with my daughter Tamara, who has transmitted
to me her experience as an Israeli; with my son Lev, who has
communicated to me his experience of life within the Muslim world and
its Islamic sphere.

I dedicate this reflection to the memory of all victims – Israelis
and Palestinians – of the violence which tears to pieces the Holy
Land/Eretz Israël/Israel-Palestine, hoping that an era of peace and
quiet will come after the time of explosions. That peace and
reconciliation reign at last over this country, drowned in tears. And
that these happen according to the ancient formula of Jewish
supplications, bimhérou beyaménou, promptly and during our lifetime.

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